We all like to have a lot of choice – now more than ever. When Netflix first launched, people were astounded by the sheer number of options available to them in their living room. The same goes for all the other streaming platforms that followed. Then, consider the amount of long- and short-form video content online, and how many millions (or billions) of hours it would take to watch it all.
But, at times, that amount of choice can feel like a burden. The paradox of choice is a real phenomenon, and it’s something a lot of us have felt when trying to pick a new show to watch on a Friday night.
Besides, lots of options doesn’t necessarily mean lots of good options, and the same can be said for some online casinos. These days, the trend for libraries bursting at the seams is being replaced by a preference for sites that truly curate their gaming catalogues – the slots at Casino Days are cherry-picked so that players can enjoy a smooth and high-quality experience from beginning to end.
Why More Used to Mean Better
There’s an argument that a bigger catalogue signals more investment into the UX, stronger relationships with more studios, and a more established presence in the market. It’s not hard to see why that impression came about – and why so many of us still find ourselves believing it.
And that’s not to say that every site with a massive game library is lacking in terms of quality. Not at all. It’s simply to say that, just because a site has a smaller library and a more select offering in terms of slots (or any other games), doesn’t mean it has less to offer in terms of quality.
Sorting the Data
Keeping on top of a massive library is hard enough, even with artificial intelligence running the algorithm like some futuristic librarian, but curating a strong library from fewer titles – capturing player trends, providing traditional favourites, and sourcing the best new games – is arguably even harder.
Platforms track session length per title, how often a game gets opened again within a week, how far someone scrolls before picking something, and abandonment rates on titles that get opened but closed within seconds. Feed that into a sorting model and a lobby starts to organise itself around what people actually return to rather than what a studio paid to have placed near the top. It's a quieter kind of design than a flashy new interface, and it rarely gets mentioned in marketing copy, but it changes the experience of opening the app far more than a fresh coat of paint on the homepage would.
Curation solves the scrolling problem, but it introduces a new one: a homepage that only ever shows what a player already likes can slowly make them start to feel restricted and uninspired. The lobbies getting this right tend to leave a couple of slots on the front page for something with no browsing history behind it at all, just to keep the offering fresh.